You Have to Get Up Pretty Early

10 Mar 2009

Since Sarah started teaching we have been getting up around five in the morning. This was born out of necessity but for me it has become something I look forward too. Not everyday, of course, but most days I look forward to my time in the morning before work or school.

On of the greatest advantages to getting up early is the amount of work you can get done. If you are anything like me you have to much going on during the day and you wish you had more time. You might think that if you stay up late and sleep in that will gain you the same time as getting up early. Well you though wrong.

Getting up early lets you get your most important work done when your brain is still fresh. The work that most of us neglect when we run out of time during the day is our own work. You never neglect to do the work required of your job when you are short on time, you neglect the personal projects that make you happy. This leads you to be grumpy and no one likes a grumpy person.

Sarah and I went from getting up around 6:30am, usually later, to getting up around 5am. This hour and a half, which is truly only an hour once you are awake, has allowed me to write as much as I have been doing. It is me time, time I spend doing what keeps me sane. You need this time.

You are thinking “But it is so hard to get up that early.” That can be true if you set your alarm for two hours earlier then normal. The trick is to set it fifteen minutes earlier for a week, then fifteen minutes earlier the next week and so on. Doing so allows your body to adjust to the new time and helps you find the ideal time for you to get up. You may find that by getting up only thirty minutes early you are able to get everything done that you want. Or you may find that by getting up three hours earlier you are able to get so much done that you can quit your job.

Sure that last may not happen for everyone, but imagine if it could. There is one consequence of getting up early that you should know. You will get tired sooner in the day and you will need to go to bed earlier. I used to stay up until midnight or so reading. Now I am lucky if I make it to ten-thirty. Honestly I don’t really mind. Sure Sarah and I don’t go out a lot in evenings, but then we never did. You will find that you have more energy during the day and that is an awesome feeling.

Another thing to keep in mind is that if you start getting up early on weekdays you have to continue that on the weekends. We have found that if we don’t adjust our sleep schedule more then an hour on the weekends we are able to keep getting up early no problem. So on weekends we go to bed around nine-thirty or ten o’clock and get up around six. This allows us to stay up and hang out with friends while still maintaining our current sleep schedule.